What girl doesn't want to be surrounded by gorgeous jocks day in and day out? Jordan Woods isn't just surrounded by hot guys, though-she leads them as the captain and quarterback of her high school football team.

They all see her as one of the guys and that's just fine. As long as she gets her athletic scholarship to a powerhouse university.

But everything she's ever worked for is threatened when Ty Green moves to her school. Not only is he an amazing QB, but he's also amazingly hot. And for the first time, Jordan's feeling vulnerable.

Summer Reading for Writers by Megan Frazer from Crowe's Nest. Peek: "A case could be made that [Robert] Cormier started the current trend of YA literature. He was one of the first to write specifically for teens and many of us who came of age reading his books are now writers ourselves."

Your Mileage May Vary by Jennifer R. Hubbard from Jennifer M. Eaton. Peek: "Someone may press a map into my hand and urge me to follow the route marked on it. But if the destination is not where I want to go, why on earth would I follow that map?"

What to Do with a Bad Review? by Stacey Barney from CBC Diversity. Peek: "I had several categories of reactions to the language used to discount not only the book, but also the appearance of a character of color...."

Congratulations to fellow Austinite Cory Putnam Oakes on signings with Sarah LaPolla of Curtis Brown Ltd. in New York, and congratulations to Sarah on signing Cory! I'm so thrilled to have an agency sister in Austin!

Alice, Summer, and Tiernan used to be best friends—as well as the self-proclaimed biggest fans of the band Level3. But when the band broke up, so did their friendship. Now, four years later, they’ve just graduated from high school.

When Level3 announces a one-time reunion show in Texas, Alice impulsively buys tickets and invites her two former friends along for the trip.

Reluctant at first, both girls agree to go, each with her own ulterior motive. But old resentments and other roadblocks—from unintended detours to lost concert tickets—keep getting in the girls’ way.

Will their friendship get an encore, or is the show really over?

Was there one writing workshop or conference that led to an "ah-ha!" moment in your craft? What happened, and how did it help you?

My “ah-ha” moment happened on live television. Well, it wasn’t actually on air, but it did occur while I was a cast member of a reality TV show.

During the summer of 2007, I was selected to be a contestant on the Mark Burnett/Steven Spielberg-produced "On the Lot," which, if you never caught it, was like "American Idol" for filmmakers, and aired on Fox for only one season.

The goal of the show was to find “America’s next great director,” and I’d been handpicked out of a pool of 12,000 applicants.

Up until that point, I’d spent my career as a filmmaker and TV producer, but writing had always been a big part of my job. Even in my free time, I found myself participating in poetry slams, or composing humorous essays to share with my friends. But up until the reality show, I considered myself a “filmmaker who wrote,” as opposed to a Writer.

And then I found myself in Los Angeles, competing head-to-head with seventeen other talented filmmakers from around the globe—literally living and breathing filmmaking for two straight months—when it suddenly became very clear to me that it was the writing part that I’d always most enjoyed (and was best at), only I’d never realized it before.

At the time, it felt like an epiphany. Though once I began looking back on my past, it seems almost laughable that it took me until the ripe old age of 37 to figure out that writing was my calling, since the signs had been there all along.

Could you describe both your pre-and-post contract revision process? What did you learn along the way? How did you feel at each stage? What advice do you have for other writers on the subject of revision?

The most important advice I could ever give to aspiring writers is: revise, revise, revise!

The first version hardly ever works. On paper, or in life.

Think about the first version of the adult you. Got a mental picture of it?

Just like you were not a suave seductress, tossing out insightful yet witty bon mots about the latest John Updike novel while simultaneously sweating in your jelly shoes at the seventh grade dance, the first draft of your fiction is also not quite ready for the grown-up world.

But the thing I find that most often holds new writers back from this process is that they’re too proud about the toil it took to make this thing they created to notice its flaws.

Do You Know How Hard They Worked on This?

Waah.

Well, guess what, people? That hard work you did is just the beginning!

Because if you’re truly doing service to your story, your prose, and your characters, the bottom line is that it’s going to take several passes to get it just right. And yes, it’s a ton of work, but each time you refine it, you discover new ways to make your story even better, until finally, it’s (almost) exactly as you envisioned it. But never completely.

Revising is dependent on your capacity for detachment, so if you’re having trouble looking at your own work objectively, remember it’s a practice and you need to give it time.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is walk away from what you’re writing for a day or two (or a month) so that you’re able to look at it with fresh, unbiased eyes.

Because I’m comfortable with the revision process, the revising I did that was based on my editor’s notes versus the revising I did on my own felt about the same.

When and where do you write? Why does that time and space work for you?

I write five days a week, Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. while my son is at school. Sometimes, if I’m on a tight deadline, I’ll write at night and on weekends, too. And I’m fortunate enough to have my very own home office, complete with an elliptical machine for whenever I need to get those endorphins flowing.

Hilary says: "In Reunited, the girls road-trip cross-country in a pea-green 1976 VW
camper bus, affectionately known as the Pea-Pod. In reality, my husband
and I own this orange 1977 VW van."

As a contemporary fiction writer, how did you deal with the pervasiveness of rapidly changing technologies? Did you worry about dating your manuscript? Did you worry about it seeming inauthentic if you didn't address these factors? Why or why not?

One of my agent’s only notes on my latest book proposal was to take out all of the pop culture references (or at least reduce them greatly) so that the book wouldn’t feel dated.

Personally, I feel it’s really important to ground my characters in our present world by acknowledging the people and things that are prevalent in today’s culture. And in all likelihood, Usher, Starbucks, and Facebook will still be around five years from now.

But I also get his point. There’s a fine line between throwing in a pop culture reference in a name-droppy way, or as background, versus using it for what it represents about our present-day society in the larger picture.

As a reader, when I come across references to pop-culture stuff I don’t get (like in The Catcher in the Rye, for example) it’s pretty easy to intuit what these things are meant to signify, even if I’m not personally familiar with them.

Hilary says: "Senior year in high school, my friends and I had an F. Scoot Fitzgerald
theme party at my friend Nancy’s house which included wearing 'period
garb" as well as some competitive croquet-playing. In case you can't
tell, I'm the one on the right."

How have you approached the task of promoting your debut book? What online or real-space efforts are you making? Where did you get your ideas? To whom did you turn for support? Are you enjoying the process, or does it feel like a chore? What advice do you have on this front for your fellow debut authors and for those in the years to come?

As a first-time author, perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned from my fellow novelists is that in today’s world, writing is only half the job. Between publishers tightening their budgets and readers who log onto Google searching for “bonus content” the second they finish a book, writers of all genres—and YA in particular—are embracing the internet not just as a promotional tool, but as a way to supplement the reading experience.

So, once I’d turned in my chapters, instead of kicking back and celebrating, I launched into my next job—building Reunited’s online universe.

After I’d redesigned my website and set up the obligatory Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube channel, and blog (sigh) it was time for the fun stuff, like shooting Reunited’s book trailer, or going into the studio to produce two songs for the book’s fictional band, Level3.

And everyone knows you can’t have a rock band without a website. So, a few mouse clicks later, www.Level3theband.com was born, the piece du résistance in Reunited’s meta-world. There, fans can read blog posts written by the band members, watch behind-the-scenes footage and music videos, and even download Level3’s songs for free.

Sometimes, all the additional work it takes to do this “other stuff” feels draining, but most of the time, I really do enjoy this part of it. The actual writing may have ended months ago, but thanks to Reunited’s online presence, the story is still very much alive.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Over a decade ago, I worked as a wilderness guide in the stunning yet massively mosquito-ridden Adirondack Mountains as part of a program called La Vida—literally: The Life.

Two leaders would take groups of twelve high school students into the woods for two weeks—carrying all our food on our backs, foregoing showers, dental floss, deodorant, and hanging a Bear Bag each night to make sure that sharp-clawed friends didn’t sniff their way into our tents.

One of the mottos of the La Vida program—which every one of the ten trips I co-led burrowed into my brain—was this gem: Redefine success.

A group wants to reach the peak of Mt. Marcy, but one member is stung by a bee on his tongue while trying to poop into a hole and is so full of pain and embarrassment that reaching the peak will be impossible that day?

Redefine success. No longer is success reaching the peak. Success—for the group—becomes assuaging the dual pain/embarrassment of one member, and making it only partway up towards the peak.

Any number of fears—both psychological or physical—could come into play on those trips. Any number of injuries, surprises, thunderstorm arrivals, lost water filters, missing Bear Bags could occur. And the only response that allowed a group to keep going was this: Redefine success.

And I think, for us writers, such a motto can be incredibly helpful. So many of us thrive on a single vision of success: Contract. Get the offer from an editor who reads our work and raves so glowingly that the cell phone on which we hear the words vibrates with enthusiasm.

The dream of a contract is a beautiful one—and one worth fighting for with every ounce of strength, tenacity, sweat, and passion we possess. But the problem arises in our work as writers when we reach the foe that says, If you don’t get a contract this time out on submission, what’s the point?

When we start to work with less passion and enthusiasm, and we feel the act of creation pale beside the often difficult odds, something has gone awry.

Redefining success allows us to continue to focus on the work at hand rather than the result. We can begin to look at where we are on the writer’s journey, and craft a vision for success that empowers us into creation rather than grinds us into defeat if we don’t achieve the One version of success.

For example, say you’ve received only form rejections for your work thus far. You could redefine success so this is your new goal: Get a personal rejection note back.

Yes! Instead of forcing yourself to feel like you’re constantly being bitten on the tongue by a bee while simultaneously trying to poop into a hole—try redefining success. You go from bundles of form rejections to your First Personal Rejection.

That night: wine. (Good wine, too. You deserve it.)

But the next day, you redefine success yet again and it becomes, say, this: More personal rejections than form rejections. The ratio changing is my new success, baby!

Yes Home Slice! Yes! My New Success!

(So you tell yourself. When you tell yourself this, that Good Wine from last night is still hanging around this morning, so you go with it.)

And when you reach that redefinition, you create another. After all, creating is what you do. It’s what you love and what you’re good at and what makes your heart beat fast.

The more we redefine success for ourselves as writers, the more we allow ourselves to celebrate the small joys along this difficult journey of becoming stronger writers.

And all the while, we’re reminding ourselves to go back to the words, to the work, to the chairs in our studies and to the cafes we frequent. We remind ourselves that we’re not always failing; instead, we’re always growing.

After all, our character arcs as writers aren’t too dissimilar from those arcs our fictional protagonists travel: we’re all trying to find the stamina to keep going, day after day, in the face of great odds. Redefining success is one small ally in the fight to persist and become the writers our hearts suggest we are.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Variations on the line had been bouncing around in my head for a while before my husband and fellow writer, Larry Hammer, reminded me where it came from.

I'd been thinking about Frost (without knowing it was Frost I was thinking about) because I'd been thinking about how once we reach a certain basic level of craft, writing is no longer about avoiding mistakes or carefully not doing anything wrong.

It's about the things we do right.

No one ever loved a book, after all, simply for not making any mistakes, for all that there are (varied, individual) things that can throw each of us out of a story. But we don't love a story just because we aren't thrown out of it, either.

We love books for what they do, not for what they manage not to do. We love them for the thing or things that hit each of our particular story buttons, that reach out to bridge the gap between story and reader, that pull on us and make us want to or need to read on. A flawed book that does the things it does right, very right is far more powerful than an unflawed book that doesn't.

None of my favorite books--the books I imprinted on as a child and teen, the books that have remained touchstones for me throughout my life--is perfect. I can see that clearly enough when I look at those books as a writer focused on craft--and that has never once stopped me from returning to those books, from treasuring them.

We don't love books for the things they aren't, but for the things they are.

But there's more to it than that. The other day, in a stray moment when I thought I was thinking about my manuscript-in-progress, I found myself thinking instead: And the same thing is true for people.

On one level, I'd always known this. On another I hadn't, or had forgotten, or needed to relearn it on that particular day in that particular way. People no more need to be perfect than stories do.

As writers who spend much of our time looking inward and so can become as critical of ourselves as our stories, this is worth remembering, too. I doubt many people hold their friends and loved ones dear simply because they never make mistakes. Lack of mistakes is not the place love comes from.

We love one another for the same reason we love stories: not for what we aren't, but for what we are.

As I dig deep to put words on the page, I find that a comforting thought.

Chloe Camden has a big heart and an even bigger collection of vintage shoes.

Life is good…until her best friend turns the entire school against her and her counselor axes her junior independent study project.

Forced to take on a meaningful project in order to pass her Junior year, Chloe joins her school’s struggling radio station, where the other students don’t always appreciate her unique style.

Ostracized by her former BFs and struggling with her beloved Grams’s mental deterioration, lonely Chloe ends up hosting a call-in show that gets the station much-needed publicity and, in the end, trouble. She also befriends radio techie and loner Duncan Moore, a quiet soul with a romantic heart.

On and off the air, Chloe tackles love, loneliness, and painful life lessons as she gives her big heart to the radio station and the misfits who call it home.

Could you tell us the story of "the call" or "the email" when you found out that your book had sold? How did you react? How did you celebrate?

When I received “the call” from my agent in October of 2010 that Amulet Books/Abrams made an offer on my contemporary teen girl manuscript, Welcome Caller, This is Chloe, I was standing naked in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. Of course I didn't have my phone on me at the time -- no pockets -- so I didn't get the news until much later that night.

That week I was going to acquisitions at multiple houses, but instead of waiting anxiously on word from my agent, I spent that particular day celebrating my youngest daughter's thirteenth birthday.

Back story: when each of my daughters makes her grand entree into the teen years, I take her on a special mom-and-daughter spa day designed specifically for her.

For my youngest, a nature-loving dancer, we journeyed a few hours south to Tucson where we went to a nature retreat and day spa on the edge of Saguaro National Park West. We spent the morning doing yoga in a pueblo-style casita, walking along desert nature trails, and sunning ourselves on a pueblo rooftop where we talked about dance shoes and boys and books.

After lunch I went for a full-body massage while my daughter headed to the sauna then to a cozy hammock with her book (Alyson Noel's Evermore). When we switched about an hour and half later, my daughter hugged me and said she loved this place, this day, and me.

With my wonderfully content daughter getting her first massage, I lingered in the sauna and took a meandering walk through the meditative labyrinth. Then I headed to the outdoor shower, a wonderfully earthy place with a stone floor and walls made of sun-bleached saguaro skeleton ribs.

As I stood naked in the shower enjoying the fall breeze and gift of motherhood, my phone rang in the nearby casita. I considered dashing through the desert to answer, as I figured it was my agent with deal or no-deal news. Either way, I knew the message would take me out of this very special moment with my daughter.

No brainer. This day was about her, not me. I chose to remain naked and blessedly unaware of my grand entree into the New York publishing world.

How have you approached the task of promoting your debut book? What online or real-space efforts are you making? Where did you get your ideas? To whom did you turn for support? Are you enjoying the
process, or does it feel like a chore? What advice do you have on this front for your fellow debut authors and for those in the years to come?

When I started putting together my marketing plan more than a year before the May 2012 release of my YA debut -- Welcome, Caller, This is Chloe -- two principles guided me.

One: any promotions I do must be a good fit for my unique and limited resources of time, talent, and treasure.

Two: I will enjoy the process.

As a public relations specialist and non-profit executive for the past twenty years, I’ve learned to plan far in advance, be flexible, and ask for help. For example, when I learned the teen-aged cover model for my book and her family were incredibly enthusiastic about Chloe’s story, I invited her to join me at book signings across the country and with podcasts for my U.K. blog tour and Radio Chloe You Tube Channel.

I turned to published author friends for recommendations on everything from bookmark designers to what kind of pens to use to sign books.

On-line resources at SCBWI gave me great tips on how to put together a school visit, and members of my RWA loops talked me through setting up book signings.

I also unabashedly asked my publisher for help. The team at Amulet Books is book-savvy and crazy-creative, and they want to sell CHLOE just as much as me.

They set up the Chloe Hotline, a phone number my readers can call to get advice from “Chloe” (me), and when asked, they provided me with giveaway items for author presentations. Writing is a solitary pursuit, but publishing and promoting is a team effort.

In the simplest terms, a good promotions plan will help you sell books. But in my world, good promotions also elevate an author’s spirit and the industry.

Don’t you love reading tweets from authors who know how to have fun and engage readers on Twitter?

Don’t you come away on fire after hearing an author give a heartfelt talk that inspires and educates?

Promotions fueled by genuine enthusiasm and organic to you and your lifestyle work best.

From a practical standpoint, a good promotions plan will clearly identify your product (you and your book) and provide a detailed action plan with tasks of what you plan to do.

This action plan could also include assignments (who will do what), target dates, status notes, and budget considerations. I keep my promo plan on a simple Word doc. It’s about five pages, updated as needed, and organized into four categories: author information, book information, on-line promotions, and traditional promotions.

Your author information isn’t book specific. On a broad level, it identifies who you are and where you want to go with your career.

For the book info section, think of it as a one-page sales sheet you could hand to a bookseller.

The on-line and traditional promo sections detail specific tasks to grow sales and your career and are limited only by your time, budget, and creativity.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl. . . .

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction.

Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

About

New York Times & Publishers Weekly best-selling, award-winning author the Tantalize series, the Feral series and other critically acclaimed fiction for young readers. MFA Faculty, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Board member, We Need Diverse Books. Ohonvyetv!